A couple of months ago I attended one of Adaptive Path’s virtual seminars on 10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment.  If you’re managing a creative team you probably know some of it, but there are a few new ideas in their and I found it quite a refreshing reminder to do those things that always seem to slip away.  Her are my notes:

  1. Cross train the entire team
    • Everyone needs to understand the skills required to deliver a solution.
    • Higher levels of creativity when individuals have a broader experience base.
  2. Rotate creative leadership
    • Take turns for discrete periods of time to expose everyone to the role and to make sure you never get stuck in one persons vision.
    • Q. What issues should you look out for if you rotate creative leadership between a multidisciplinary team of varying levels of skill?
      • Don’t see passing over responsibility or handing off work. See it as giving over leadership, view it as an opportunity to mentor.
      • Do it in small controlled stages throughout a project that everyone is involved in.
  3. Actively turn the corner
    • Divergence - convergency of ideas.  Have a systematic way of changing peoples thought process.
      • Divergence is when you are growing the number of ideas.
      • Convergency is when you’re reducing the number of ideas done to one refined one.
  4. Know your roles
    • Everyone needs to know what they’re responsible for, what decisions they can make and when they need to “kick it up”.
  5. Practice as a team
    • Open design sessions. 1hr a week - open to anyone to come and help solve problems and any team can bring one issue that needs to be resolved.
  6. Make your mission explicit
    • Express your desired outcome / aim.
    • Know your constraints / limits.
      • Impose your own constraints:
      • Example - diabeties monitor - must be able to be worn during sex, totally changed the nature of the brief
  7. Kill your darlings softly
    • Respectful, standardised, repeatable elemination.
      • Avenque Q - “put it in the TV show…”.
      • Chef - “really good and when you open your place it should be on the menu”.
    • Ensure that people understand why things are eliminated.
    • Right level of critique at the right time - not spending loads of time discussing and debating.
    • Make sure decisions are explicit and firm.
  8. Leadership is a service
    • Talk about each indivudals investment in a project.
      • Hard decisions can then be understood.
  9. Generate projects around creative interests.
    • Without a creative champion, projects often fail.
    • If the main project is not engaging, keep side projects running along to keep engagement up.
  10. Remember your audience.
    • Avenue Q primarily writen in diners.
  11. Celebrate failures.
    • Post mortems vs. after parties.
    • What did work, what didn’t work and what you can learn…

If you want to listent to the audio, they have published the version of the talk that they presented at SXSW. You can download the Audio MP3 and view the slides as well.

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 2:39 pm | Categories: web teams

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